Where Do I Start With Google Analytics?

Where Do I Start With Google Analytics?

Google analytics is the premier way to track your websites traffic, where it comes from, what pages on your site are popular and everything in between. But if you are just beginning it can be a pretty overwhelming platform to navigate. Luckily there are a few steps you can take to find some basic data views that should give you valuable stats on the health of your website.

There are a few places to start when it comes to picking important data views in Google analytics, here are 4 for people just starting out with the analytics platform that will be beneficial:

Demographics: This will be located under ‘audience’ on the tab to the left after opening up analytics. This will basically tell you who exactly is looking at your site. It will give you the age and gender of people who visit your site. This will allow you to create a more narrow marketing strategy that will resonate with the correct audience. If you are a certain type of business, this may be something you already know- but it’s always possible there may be an untapped segment that need your business!

Channel View: You’ll find this one under ‘acquisition’ then ‘all traffic’ and finally ‘channels’ starting at the left tab in analytics. This one is important because it will show where your traffic is actually coming from. For example if you have been trying to ramp up your traffic from SEO, you’ll want to look at ‘organic’ traffic and monitor that. If you began running PPC campaigns, you’ll want to take a look at ‘paid search’.

Devices Overview: This one will be found through ‘audience’ then to ‘mobile’ then on to ‘overview’. This one will tell you how much of your traffic is coming from a specific device. Mainly you’ll want to know if visitors are coming from mobile or desktop. If you see an increase in mobile users over time, you’ll want to ensure your site is optimized for mobile users- to ensure the best possible experience for users.

Landing Pages: You’ll get to this one by selecting ‘behavior’ then ‘site content’ and finally ‘landing pages’. The main purpose of this one is to signal which pages on your website visitors are landing on when they find your site through specific channels. This is good for businesses with a bunch of different of services or products that are available. Here you’ll want to see what the bounce rate looks like as well, the lower the better. So if you have a high bounce rate on some of your pages with the highest traffic, it may be a good time to evaluate those pages and tweak them for a better user experience.